


Live On a Hill Against the Sky

by inexplicifics



Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [11]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24603220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics
Summary: Three years after Geralt becomes Warlord of the North, a man comes to Kaer Morhen to beg for aid. And when all is said and done, he stays.Jan genuinely doesn't know how the Witchers of Kaer Morhen have stayed alive so long without any household staff at all.
Relationships: Eskel & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683661
Comments: 266
Kudos: 3500
Collections: Good Relationship Etiquette (familial included) - or Good BDSM Etiquette - or Good Relationship and BDSM Etiquette, Notes From The Path





	Live On a Hill Against the Sky

**Eskel**

The man goes to his knees in front of Geralt’s throne and presses his head to the stone floor, trembling. Geralt, who is not in point of fact in his throne, looks over at Eskel, who shrugs eloquently. _He_ sure as fuck doesn’t know what this is about.

“Speak,” Geralt says after a moment.

“Please, lord,” the kneeling man says, voice breaking. “I have come to beg the White Wolf for aid. I will pay anything. Please. The monster has taken my child - all our children.” Aw _shit_ , Eskel thinks. ‘All our children’ is a bad, bad phrase.

Geralt steps forward and goes down on one knee beside the man. “Sit up,” he says gruffly, and the man does, gaping at him in awe and terror. “Where are you from?”

“Leyda,” the man whispers. Five days away, as a Witcher runs - more, for a human who is clearly half-dead with exhaustion and bears the partially-healed marks of a nasty beating.

Geralt glances up at Eskel, who steps closer, resting a hand on Geralt’s shoulder. “Tell us everything,” Eskel says, making his voice as gentle as he can.

The stammered, broken words are enough, if only barely. Ladies of the woods. Of all the foul creatures -

“Get me Letho and Coën and Aiden,” Geralt says. “We leave tonight.” Eskel nods: the other three are very good, and bringing Witchers from several Schools will allow them to work on combining their tactics.

“Lord?” the man gasps, scent spiking with hope and fear.

“We’ll kill your monsters,” Geralt says, rising and nodding to him.

“What - what price, lord?” the man whispers.

Eskel offers him a hand up as Geralt shakes his head. “No price,” the White Wolf says, and his lips quirk, just a little, in what no one but Eskel and maybe Vesemir would be able to tell is a wry smile. “I’m Warlord of the North, aren’t I? Your children are mine to guard.”

*

Eskel installs the exhausted man at the end of the Bear table with a mug of weak ale and goes off to summon Letho and Coën and Aiden, who all look eager to head out, and sends them up to meet Geralt in the library and do a little quick refresher course on ladies of the wood and how to kill the filthy things, and when he comes back, the man is still there, waiting, his hands folded in his lap. Eskel’d half expected he would have fled the keep. He rises when Eskel approaches, and bows deeply. “My lord.”

“Just Eskel,” Eskel says. The humans who come up to Kaer Morhen all insist on giving him titles he’s never earned nor wanted, and most of them just look scared whenever he corrects them, but he’s not going to give up. He’s no sort of lord, never has been, never will be. “Geralt - the Wolf - he’ll be traveling too fast for you to keep up. You can follow, or you can wait here until he gets back.” Even with a horse, no human could keep pace with four Witchers moving at the ground-eating trot that they can keep up for days if necessary.

“I will wait here, lor- Eskel,” the man says. “There is - there is nothing left for me in Leyda now.” The pain in his scent is sharp and clear. Eskel raises an eyebrow in silent question.

The man sighs, and swallows. “I was my lord Borys’ steward,” he says quietly. “When our children began to vanish, he forbade us to speak of it to outsiders. When my daughter - when she was taken, I went to him and begged for aid, and he turned me out in disgrace. My wife followed our daughter into the woods; we found her body three nights later. I went to my lord Borys again, and he had me beaten for my temerity.”

Eskel blinks at the man in genuine surprise and no little respect. Beaten and cast out by his own _human_ lord for daring to ask for aid, and he still dared to come all the way to Kaer Morhen and beg the _Wolf_ for help. Eskel will need to tell Geralt this before Geralt heads out - this lord Borys isn’t going to be lord of _anything_ if Eskel has anything to say about it, which in point of fact he _does_ , these days.

“What’s your name?” he asks after a moment.

“Jan Kelner,” the man replies.

“Well,” Eskel says, a little awkwardly, “I guess let’s - find you a room, I suppose.”

Jan swallows and ducks his head and says, “I could not ask you to spend your valuable time on me,” and visibly swallows back the ‘my lord’ he wants to tack on to the end. “Only direct me where to find the steward, and I shall cause you no more trouble.”

Eskel snorts. “Insofar as we’ve got one, I’m it,” he says dryly. Hemminks and Tjold help as much as they can, but though Hemminks dealt with purchasing supplies for the keep back when it only housed _one_ School of Witchers - and all of them were only _there_ during the winter months - supplying and organizing the keep when it’s _full_ of Witchers is a much larger problem. Eskel’s been learning about budgeting and supply chains and all _sorts_ of new things, and the Schools have taken on a rotating slate of cleaning and cooking and laundry, with a rather mixed level of success.

Jan’s jaw drops. “...Insofar as you...have one?” he blurts, horrified. “But you are the White Wolf’s right hand! Surely you have duties beyond the organization of his household!”

“I surely do,” Eskel agrees. “But we don’t exactly have a line of trained household staff stretching down the mountain.”

Jan blinks at him for a long moment, and then, slowly, his shoulders go back. “You’ve got me,” he says. “If the Warlord will accept my oath.” His sincerity is almost palpable. He’s spoken no lie at all.

“...Ask me again once he gets back from dealing with the ladies,” Eskel decides. “And then...we’ll see.”

***

**Jan**

Jan spends two long, tense weeks wandering the halls of Kaer Morhen, waiting for word of the Warlord’s return. The Witchers are never less than polite, in their own rough-edged, coarse-voiced ways, but they clearly don’t know what to make of him, a human in these halls where the only other humans are the boys waiting to become Witchers themselves. They eye him almost warily - as if a mere man could harm a _Witcher_!

But they do not prevent him from exploring, and Jan wanders the keep from its towers to its deep cellars, and marvels at it, and - because he _is_ a steward, and a good one - takes note of all the servants this keep truly needs to make run like the efficient household it should be.

A cook, that’s the first thing, with undercooks and scullery maids, bakers and servers and a brewer and a pantler and and a butler to mind the drinks. Goatherds and shepherds and goose-girls and pig-boys to mind the animals, and a slaughterer to turn animals into meat. Chambermaids to sweep the dusty corridors and scrub the stains from the tables. A whole host of laundresses with strong stomachs. A marshal to oversee the stables, with grooms to tend the huge herd of beautiful horses that live in the fields behind the keep. A stonemason to fix the cracks in the keep’s walls; a blacksmith, or perhaps two, one for weapons and one for more common household items; a carpenter; an armorer. Kaer Morhen is large enough to require a small _army_ of servants. Jan has never had to hire so many at once before - Lord Borys’ household was quite well established before he joined it, and hiring a single new scullery maid or even replacing the head cook is a very different proposition from staffing an entire _castle_. Assuming he is allowed to stay. Assuming he _does_ become the steward of the Warlord of the North.

And thinking about what sort of staff Kaer Morhen needs keeps him from thinking of Roza, or of Julita. If he thinks of them - if he lets himself remember Roza’s body, the marks upon it - the terrible silence of their little house, no child’s laughter echoing from the walls -

No. Jan understands grief: his parents died of an ague when he was young, three of his siblings by illness or accident, his beloved grandparents of age and the ill health that comes of working oneself to the bone for sixty years. He has learned how to weep, and how to stop weeping; how to take his sorrow and look it in the eye and master it rather than letting it master him; how to bury it in honest labor.

Two weeks after the Warlord of the North set out for Leyda with two swords on his back and three Witchers on his heels, he returns. Eskel comes and finds Jan when the walltop sentries spot the Warlord on the Trail leading up to the keep, and Jan is waiting in the great hall when the Warlord finally arrives. He’s just as terrifying as he was the first time Jan saw him: white-haired and white-skinned like he’s been carved from marble, with those terrible golden eyes that seemed to look through Jan, weigh him and assess him and - somehow, miraculously - find him acceptable.

He looks tired now, but only perhaps as tired as Jan would after a long day on duty. Certainly not as tired as any mortal man would be after running afoot to Leyda and back, and - Jan hopes, Jan _prays_ \- killing its monsters while he was there.

The Warlord nods to him, and unslings a bag from his shoulder, and pours the contents out on the floor at Jan’s feet, and it takes Jan a moment of horrified incomprehension to parse what he is seeing: four objects - four neatly severed heads.

Three are horrid, misshapen things, mockeries of humanity - vaguely female, perhaps, but definitely monstrous, with sharp blackened teeth and an odd acrid smell. The fourth is one Jan _recognizes_ , to his own shock and dismay: Lord Borys, expression fixed forever into one of shock and anger.

“He’d made a deal with them,” one of the other Witchers rumbles, and when Jan looks up, he sees all of them are _furious_ , staring down at the heads in disgust and rage. “Traded all the children of your village for a promise none of his mistresses would ever bear him bastards.” The Witcher spits. “Guess he won’t have to worry about that again.”

And then the big Witcher - Letho, who wears a Viper medallion and scowls like a thundercloud - makes a sort of shrugging motion, and unslings a sort of harness from his back, and puts down, gently, on her feet - alive, _alive_ , Jan can barely believe his eyes -

Julita.

She runs to Jan, ignoring the horrid things on the floor, and Jan gathers her into his arms and clings to her, weeping into her filthy hair. His Julita, his _darling_ , his little girl - alive.

The Warlord asked no price for his aid, but for _this_ \- Jan sinks to his knees at the White Wolf’s feet, Julita cradled in his arms, and says, “Lord, I beg you: let me serve you all my days.”

The Warlord looks at him, piercing golden eyes as sharp as his swords, and Jan holds his breath as that gaze goes right through him again, sees _everything_ , like every secret Jan has ever had is a book to be read -

“I accept,” the White Wolf rumbles, and Jan can breathe again.

*

Finding potential servants is both easy and shockingly complicated. The easy bit is talking to Eskel, who sends Witchers down to the villages and towns within three days’ travel of the base of the Trail up to Kaer Morhen, with flyers to put up on the village notice boards advertising terms of service. Jan consults with Eskel about the keep’s budget and sets _very_ fair terms, good pay and three sets of clothing a year and a half-day off every week. There’s not precisely a _flood_ of applicants, but there are many. All of whom, Jan assumes, have a pretty decent chance of being spies in the pay of any or all of the monarchs of the countries bordering the Warlord’s lands. He goes to Eskel again to figure out how, precisely, the Witchers want him to deal with _that_.

It turns out Witchers can smell both fear and lies. Jan goes down to the bottom of the Trail with Hemminks and interviews each and every one of the potential servants, and only the ones who can look Hemminks in the eyes and swear that they’ll be loyal to the Wolf and _not_ piss themselves or faint get offered jobs. Jan ends up having to do five rounds of that, in different towns, before he actually finds as many honest, brave people as Kaer Morhen really needs.

Most of them, it results, have very similar stories to his own. Marlene, the woman who presents herself with a firm request to become head cook, was a wight, until the White Wolf freed her from her curse. There is a pair of siblings who were almost eaten by drowners as children, and were saved by a Witcher who didn’t even ask for payment; an older woman who promises she can run the laundry and bears scars from a werewolf that a Witcher slew before it could devour her. Half a dozen young women - siblings, they insist, despite the obvious impossibility - who were, Jan later learns, kept captive in a brothel, and freed by an irritated Witcher who could smell their misery. (One of them turns out to be very good with children, and Jan hires her out of his own salary to care for Julita during the day - when Julita is not pestering the baker for lessons, that is.) A man who hid in a hayloft while his family was slain by barghests, and was saved by a Witcher who nearly died in the doing. On and on the stories go, until Jan finally has nearly fifty other humans under his command, all of them sworn to the Wolf, all of them with their own personal reasons to serve the Witchers of Kaer Morhen with their whole hearts.

The first six months are...challenging, though not for the reasons Jan initially expects. All of the servants are both skilled and earnest in their desire to serve; no, the problem is that the _Witchers_ are not used to having servants at all. Marlene, at least, is welcomed with open arms and clear delight: very few Witchers are skilled cooks, and the food she serves is both plentiful and delicious. The chambermaids, though, are greeted with bafflement at first, the grooms with mild distrust, as it turns out Witchers are often fond of caring for their own horses. And the poor laundresses come to Jan in a weeping mass about a week after he hires them, lamenting their inability to remove monster ichor from either cloth or leather without entirely destroying the clothes.

Jan takes a long look at the clothing - stained black as midnight, the color utterly unchanged by lye soap or vinegar or hot water or vigorous scrubbing - and sends for the leatherworker, who takes a _longer_ look at it and says several impressively foul words. Jan sends Hemminks back down the Trail again to look for an expert dyer who is willing to work for Witchers, and two weeks later Hemminks returns triumphant with a woman who examines the stained cloth and says some even more impressively foul words than the leatherworker did. It takes some time to set up, and confuses the Witchers who are asked to bring back monster ichor from their hunts, and at once point stains three laundress’s feet jet black for a month, but a year later, the trade in black-dyed materials is lucrative enough that Jan barely has to rely on the tribute wagons to fund the keep. A year after _that_ , Jan brings Eskel down to the strongroom and shows him the chests of gold they’ve earned, and Eskel almost faints in shock, and mutters some curse words Jan hasn’t even heard from Lambert, and Jan doubles every servant’s pay.

By that time, things are running a lot more smoothly. Every corridor in the keep is clear of dust and cobwebs. All the rusted hinges have been oiled; all the broken furniture has been mended or replaced. The tapestries Jan discovered deep in a storeroom have been hung in some of the corridors, blocking the nastiest drafts, and the master mason and his apprentices have nearly finished patching all the cracks. Marlene runs the kitchen with a benevolent but iron hand. The laundresses have figured out how to get bloodstains out of _almost_ everything. The chimneys have been cleaned, for apparently the first time in decades, and Jan somehow managed to keep a straight face when the Cat Witchers decided to help by climbing up the _insides_ of the chimney stacks. The library is still a bit of a mess, but that can wait until they find an actual trained librarian; _Jan_ sure as hell isn’t touching those books. Some of them look like they were soaked in the poisons they describe. Julita is thriving, and the baker has promised her an apprenticeship as soon as she turns ten.

And Jan wears a medallion, now - not a Wolf medallion, for all he swore himself to the White Wolf. His is the first of a new design, on which seven tiny symbols are etched: Wolf and Bear and Cat, Crane and Manticore, Griffin and Viper. The sigil of the servants of Kaer Morhen, those who keep the Warlord’s army fed and clothed and tidied and _organized_.

Those humans who, like him, have sworn themselves, without qualm or reservation, to the Warlord and his cause - a lord who has sworn that their children, _all_ their children, are his to guard.

**Author's Note:**

> Still working on anything with plot!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Live On a Hill Against the Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24617389) by [AceOfTigers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfTigers/pseuds/AceOfTigers)
  * [Things keep changing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27175787) by [Arzani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arzani/pseuds/Arzani)




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